What Next for Documentary?

Past Conference Details

Tueaday 4 July - Thursday 7 July 2011

President’s Welcome Address

Welcome to the 8th Annual ASPERA Conference. Vice-president Howard Wroth and his team here at Curtin have been working extremely hard to deliver what I am sure will prove to be an exciting and intellectually stimulating program. The non-fictional / documentary space has always provided screen production scholars natural harbour. It’s very nature allows us to examine, test and play with the moving image’s ‘form’ and ‘content’, and their complex relationship with each other. It is also a meaning-making space that embraces innovation and I look forward to the papers unpacking how the now ubiquitous online environment has enhances and created new conversations about the role of documentary within our storytelling traditions and culture.

I encourage you all to extend the dialogue that this annual conference facilitates and to submit your papers for publication in our special issue conference proceedings. Special thanks go to Gillian Leahy and Mick Broderick for their considerable work in editing 2010’s proceedings which can be found in the Text Special Issue 11.

As outgoing president I would like to thank the ASPERA executive team in what has proven to be a year of consolidation and relationship building. It has been an unstable time within higher education with the demise of the ALTC and the constant tinkering with the ERA. However it is a year in which our discipline can claim to have ‘arrived’. As Mick Broderick indicated in the Text editorial, the results of the ERA prove categorically that our discipline operates significantly ‘at or above world standard’ and I can report that at the recent HASS on the Hill conference Minister Kim Carr mentioned ‘creative practice’ at least six times in his speech to humanities researchers. We can rest assured ‘they’ know how we are, what we do and how important we are to the Australian cultural landscape – now we just have to continue to lobby for fair access to the resources we help generate.

Congratulations and thanks once again to all presenters (we wouldn’t be here without you) and I very much look forward to speaking with as many of your as possible in the next few days.